All is well with tonight's San Francisco Ballet Gala, but plans for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 28th annual Valentine Ball have ground to a halt. The $1,000-a-ticket dinner-dance, which also was to have featured a fashion show, was abruptly canceled two weeks ago, surprising many who had already paid for their tickets.

Ball chairwoman Ann Fisher cited lack of corporate underwriting. She declined to comment further, lending the circumstances an air of mystery.

Museum officials said ticket sales would have covered costs and staff time involved in putting on the event but would not have raised enough money to make the benefit worthwhile. Proceeds go to exhibitions and programs.

The continuing economic slump is considered a factor in a decline in the benefit's profitability in recent years. In 2000, the sellout raised $211,000; in 2003, only three-quarters of all tickets sold, and $70,000 was raised, according to figures provided by Deputy Museum Director Paul Johnson.

At SFMOMA, where the loyalties of key donors are divided and squabbles among trustees are not uncommon, some patrons privately question whether there is more to the story.

Word is that those involved with the preparations knew months ago that the party was seriously underfunded and should have been canceled then but that Fisher went ahead in hopes that a sponsorship would materialize at the last minute. Museum officials -- including board chair Elaine McKeon, who is stepping down in June -- decided, with a few of the trustees, to give the event the ax just before Christmas and let the other trustees know later, insiders said. Some donors worry this has cost the museum goodwill and trust - - if only temporarily -- and may have the effect of scaring away sponsors in the long term.

"What they didn't take into account was how many people had counted on the ball, how much passion there was this year for the fashion show, and how much momentum was building," one donor said.

"This is a scandal within the museum," said another donor, who was angry about what the donor called the unbusinesslike way the museum strung out its hopes for a sponsorship and the way a small group of people decided to cancel it. "It reflects badly on the museum."

But Cathy Post, president of the Modern Art Council, the primary fund- raising auxiliary at SFMOMA, gave the situation a positive spin. "There's no mystery to this," she said. "This decision was fiscally responsible and demonstrated the integrity of SFMOMA. We want to encourage people to participate in our events, but not if they're not going to be profitable."

The auxiliary is now focusing its efforts on the Modern Art Council's Art Auction on May 19, the museum's biggest fund-raiser of the year.

Tonight, tonight: If expectations are stratospheric for tonight's San Francisco Ballet gala, it's only because Ballet board member Nicola Miner and her husband, Robert Mailer Anderson, have set the bar so high.

Their pre-gala thank-you party for Ballet benefactors and patrons was a smash because their modern Pacific Heights home by Marc LaRoche is such a stunner. It's got lots of glass, redwood and curving walls (and a separate guesthouse) and sits on a lot that stretches from Pacific to Broadway, with a landscaped courtyard and views of the bay from the upper floors. That sound guests heard wasn't the couple's two children spilling marbles, but everyone's jaws dropping on the cherry wood floors.

"Who do I have to know to get a house like this?" asked dermatologist Seth Matarasso.

"They're adults? I thought they were teenagers, they look so young," Beth Townsend said of Miner, 33, the daughter of Oracle co-founder Robert Miner, and Anderson, 35, author of the best-seller "Boonville." (He and his cousin, Zack Anderson, have just sold a pilot script to FX network to make a TV series based on the book.) Catering was by Miner's sister, Justine, chef at RNM on Haight Street.

These are the same Miner/Andersons who were the talk of the neighborhood at Christmas. They have a lighted, anatomically correct robot sculpture facing Broadway, which gives kids who go to a nearby school lessons in the human body.

Anderson thought to cover the robot's privates with a sock and woke one morning to find a red bow on it. Neighborhood pranksters Ingrid Hills and Laney Thornton had sneaked out in the middle of the night with a ladder, and called later to fess up.

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